Under Construction: America at 250
June 14, 2026 – August 29, 2027
As America marks 250 years of its ongoing experiment in democracy, Under Construction: America at 250 invites reflection on where we’ve come from, where we are now, and where we’re headed. Selected through a nationwide call for art, seventeen powerful and diverse works, created by individual artists and collaborative teams, are installed across the museum’s landscaped grounds and at two offsite locations in Duxbury:
- Reynolds-Maxwell Garden (a Duxbury Rural and Historical Society property near the Bluefish River Bridge)
- The Center on Mayflower Street
Each piece offers a moment to pause and, in this Semiquincentennial year, ask ourselves: What does America mean to me?
Michael Alfano
Hopkinton, Massachusetts
Michael Alfano is a figurative and public-art sculptor known for finely modeled bronzes, portraiture, and large outdoor commissions that are often philosophical and evocative. Working primarily in bronze and other durable materials, he creates narrative, surreal-leaning forms that move fluidly from intimate portrait busts to monumental civic sculptures and extended outdoor installations. His public works “dot” the East Coast, including projects such as The Starter for the Boston Marathon, Holocaust Monument in Jericho, New York, Stand Up, Speak Out on Long Island, and Ethics of Peace at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.Originally from New York and now based in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, Alfano studied at the Art Students League of New York and Boston University, augmenting his training with internships with established sculptors. He maintains an active gallery and commission practice, with work in museums, parks, waterfront sculpture walks, and private collections worldwide, and regularly documents site installations and public programs through his studio website.
William Brayton
Conway, Massachusetts
William Brayton works across sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and wall reliefs, exploring abstract forms built around intersections, how parts meet, touch, and imply motion. His improvisational approach yields branching structures intertwined with bolted aluminum arcs, spheres, and glowing discs that catch and reflect light. In drawings, related imagery floats within atmospheric space; prints push color further from digitized source material. Recent wall reliefs limit the palette to black, white, and local woods, where stacking creates hidden areas and shadows that suggest limits to knowing, light animates surfaces while marking inaccessible edges. William Brayton has exhibited extensively in public galleries, museums, and sculpture parks, including Chesterwood Museum, The Mount, Brattleboro Museum, and Hudson River Museum. A professor emeritus at Hampshire College, where he founded the sculpture program and served as Dean of the School for Interdisciplinary Arts, he has received grants from the Pollock Krasner, Andrew W. Mellon, and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundations.
Murray Dewart
Brookline, Massachusetts Murray Dewart is a Boston area sculptor and co-founder of Boston Sculptors Gallery, celebrated for monumental, gate-like works in bronze and granite that act as portals and meditative markers in the landscape. His sculpture often takes the form of open, upright structures that recall gates, thresholds, or altars, inviting viewers to slow down, pass through, or pause in relation to the surrounding site. Over several decades, he has completed numerous large-scale commissions and participated in exhibitions across the United States and abroad, with work placed in public collections, sculpture parks, and institutional settings. Frequently grouped in sequences or clusters, Dewart’s pieces establish architectural rhythms and contemplative alignments, balancing a muscular, engineered presence with refined surface and joinery. Writing on his work often notes its quiet spirituality and its dialogue with both New England landscape and global traditions of sacred architecture. He remains an influential figure in New England public sculpture.
Jacob Kulin
Boston, Massachusetts Jacob Kulin is a contemporary sculptor whose work bridges industrial craft and organic form, moving fluidly between gallery objects and large-scale public commissions. Working in wood, metal, and glass, he often combines precision fabrication with hand-finished details, creating sculptures that feel both engineered and intuitively grown. Many of his pieces respond directly to architecture and landscape, using repeated elements, rhythmic lines, and carefully balanced cantilevers to choreograph how viewers move around and through space. Kulin’s practice encompasses freestanding sculptures, relief works, and site-specific installations that engage light, shadow, and shifting perspectives over time. Across formats, he remains focused on how material, proportion, and structure can quietly transform an environment, inviting viewers into a heightened awareness of balance, tension, and the subtle dialogue between built and natural worlds.
Cat Mazza and Remy Hunter
Milton, Massachusetts/Brooklyn, New York Cat Mazza (with collaborator Remy Hunter) works at the intersection of textiles, digital media, and social history. Mazza’s projects translate historic textile charts and labor histories into contemporary knitted works, software, and participatory projects; Remy Hunter has collaborated as a digital designer and developer on microsites and interactive tools that document and present pattern research. Their Electroknit Dymaxion work and related projects make archival patterns accessible through code, knitting charts, and VR/online experiences, highlighting connections between craft, labor, and technology. Together they combine research-driven practice, open-source tools, and public programming—producing work that moves easily between gallery installation, community workshops, and digital platforms.
Andy Moerlein
Maynard, Massachusetts Andy Moerlein is a sculptor whose work ranges from intimate gallery objects to monumental, site-responsive public installations, often rooted in direct engagement with the landscape. Foraging in forests and along riverbeds, he incorporates found wood, stone, and other natural forms into sculptures that foreground place, material memory, and the lyricism of changing environments. Educated at Dartmouth College and active in residencies and international sculpture symposia, Moerlein creates large outdoor works—some at truly monumental scale—that respond to site history and topography while retaining a distinctly hand-made, poetic sensibility. His public commissions and temporary installations have appeared in museums, sculpture gardens, and landscape projects across the United States and abroad, frequently developed in collaboration with local communities and host institutions. Balancing formal refinement with ecological awareness, Moerlein builds sculptures that invite slow looking, physical encounter, and a renewed attention to the living systems and stories embedded in the land.
Richard Neal
Barnstable, Massachusetts Richard Neal is a painter and sculptor based at Chalkboard Studio on Cape Cod, whose practice moves between intimate works on paper and large, site-aware sculptural installations. He holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and has long been active in regional museum and gallery circuits, including a recent solo exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Neal’s sculptural work, often architectural or marine-referential, engages material history, vernacular building, and a wry sense of narrative, drawing on Cape waterfronts, working harbors, and weathered structures. He also works in printmaking and mixed media, maintaining an active exhibition schedule on the Cape and in New England more broadly. In the studio, drawing, collage, and three-dimensional construction are tightly interwoven, so that ideas migrate across paper, panel, and sculptural form. The result is a body of work that rewards close looking and reflection, inviting viewers to consider how memory, labor, and landscape intersect in built environments.
Gary Orlinsky
Leverett, Massachusetts
Gary Orlinsky creates site-specific and gallery-based sculpture from found, natural, and industrial materials, mapping the dialogue between landscape and built structure. His site projects range from installations at historic estates and artist parks to public commissions and classroom collaborations, where he often works directly with students and community members. Blending careful craft with garden-scale interventions, Orlinsky builds delicate assemblages and large, girder-like supports that recall local infrastructures while remaining attentive to the textures and contingencies of place. Exhibited in sculpture gardens, museums, and temporary outdoor programs, his work frequently investigates the edges between architecture and ecology, positioning constructed forms within natural contexts so they read as both intervention and extension of the surrounding environment. He also teaches and develops community-focused projects that foreground material process, site awareness, and collaborative making, encouraging participants to reconsider how built forms shape their experience of landscape and public space.
Kasia Ozga
Greensboro, North Carolina
Kasia Ozga is a sculptor and public-art practitioner who repurposes mass-produced and discarded materials into immersive installations and commissionsthat foreground transformation and reuse. A Polish-French-American artist and educator, she explores themes of waste, migration, environmental justice, and bodily presence, often creating archways, passageways, and built structures that invite entry, reflection, and collective gathering. Her commissions and residency projects, including large-scale outdoor works and socially engaged initiatives, emphasize the “afterlives” and social histories of materials, asking how what we throw away can be reconfigured into shared spaces of attention. Working across drawing, sculpture, and installation, Ozga develops hybrid forms that operate at once as objects and environments, encouraging viewers to move through, around, and under her constructions. Her practice consistently probes how built forms shape social movement and perception, inviting audiences to reconsider their relationship to infrastructures of care, circulation, and ecological responsibility.
Flora Ranis
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Flora Ranis is a sculptor who blends industrial materials and storytelling, transforming utilitarian elements into fluid, hand-made forms that register as contemporary myth. A Yale-trained welder and maker, she interrogates the relationship between bodies and built infrastructure, expanding ordinary objects into large-scale sculptures that feel at once architectural and intimate. Working primarily with steel, paint, and repurposed structural components, Ranis creates works that read as narratives of labor, landscape, and memory, often suggesting tools, bridges, or supports that have been reimagined through touch and time.
Recognized in regional prize programs and exhibitions, she maintains an active practice that spans outdoor commissions and gallery-based projects. Her sculptures emphasize craft, scale, and narrative voice, performing as landmarks in the landscape while also functioning as fables—inviting viewers to imagine who might use, inhabit, or remember these forms and how built structures shape lived experience.
Jackie Reeves
Sandwich, Massachusetts
Jackie Reeves is a mixed-media artist and muralist whose practice spans public murals, large-scale fabric paintings, figurative collage, and community-centered projects. Raised in Montreal and trained in design and fine art, she moved from commissioned murals into gallery work and installation while maintaining a focus on narrative, place, and the civic role of public imagery. Her murals, including multiple projects on Cape Cod and in Provincetown, as well as collaborative community initiatives, demonstrate a commitment to accessible, visually engaging work that responds to local histories and specific audiences. In the studio, Reeves develops layered surfaces and figurative fragments that echo her mural sensibility: bold, textured, and socially minded, often incorporating drawing, paint, fabric, and found imagery. She continues to take on public commissions, festivals, and residency projects across the region, using her hybrid practice to explore how images circulate between public space and more intimate gallery settings.
Stacy Latt Savage
Mattapoisett, Massachusetts
Stacy Latt Savage is a sculptor and professor whose practice spans figuration, installation, and public commissions, often centering on the body’s presence and vulnerability in contemporary life. Working across welded metal, cast elements, and mixed media, she constructs forms that register both structural strength and visible fracture, inviting viewers to consider how bodies endure, adapt, and transform. Her work has been exhibited in museums, university galleries, and outdoor public settings, where she frequently develops projects that respond to site and choreograph viewer movement around, through, or beneath sculptural elements. Teaching is an important counterpart to her studio practice, and she is active in regional arts programming, mentorship, and exhibition initiatives. Savage’s sculptures combine tactile surfaces with a clear structural rigor, amplifying themes of presence, transformation, and material resilience while encouraging slow, embodied encounters with form and space.
Aaron T Stephan
Portland, Maine
Aaron T Stephan is an installation and sculptural artist known for witty, research- driven public projects, cyanotype works, and monumental stone and mixed-media sculptures. His practice frequently reframes everyday objects and civic symbols, using repetition, shifts in scale, and performative strategies to question how knowledge and authority are constructed. Stephan has realized major public commissions and museum projects in sculpture parks, urban plazas, and institutional settings, where his inventive installations often double as platforms for public dialogue. Working across carved stone, large fabricated structures, photo-based processes, and collaborative, community-oriented interventions, he engages histories of art, architecture, and politics while grounding his work in specific sites. Throughout, Stephan combines humor with conceptual rigor, producing sculptures and environments that encourage viewers to reconsider the familiar infrastructures, images, and systems that organize shared space.
Martin Ulman and Michael Ulman
Roslindale, Massachusetts
Martin and Michael Ulman, a father-and-son team, work with found and reclaimed materials to create kinetic, whimsical sculptures that reimagine industrial detritus as living machines. Their practice turns salvaged metal, gears, and vintage hardware into motorcycles, boats, and figurative assemblages whose patina and mechanics suggest stories of reuse, labor, and play. Martin’s longstanding local presence and Michael’s portfolio of found-object motorcycles and figures reflect a shared eye for narrative detail: welded fragments become characters, panels become skins, and simple mechanical gestures animate otherwise inert parts. Exhibiting in Boston-area venues, regional shows, and open-studio events, they also regularly contribute site-specific pieces and commission work that blend public engagement with hands-on fabrication. Their sculptures are at once nostalgic and transformative, inviting viewers to read histories embedded in materials while enjoying the sheer delight of bricolage, motion, and the inventive afterlives of discarded things.
michaelulman.com
roslindalestudio.com
Josh Urso
Jersey City, New Jersey
Josh Urso is a contemporary sculptor working in cast concrete, stone, pigment, and paint to create both intimate works and outdoor-ready, monumentally scaled pieces. Drawing on a background in engineering and product design, he emphasizes process, material experimentation, and the deliberate cracking, breaking, and reassembly of form. Fissures in concrete and surface pigments become both ornament and metaphor, suggesting strain, repair, and the persistence of structure over time. His practice readily adapts to commissioned public settings, sculpture gardens, and landscape projects, and his work has appeared in fairs, regional exhibitions, and outdoor sculpture programs. Urso’s pieces balance clear geometric frameworks with organic interruptions, yielding tactile, robust forms that withstand outdoor exposure while rewarding close, haptic looking. Across scales, his sculptures invite viewers to consider how pressure, failure, and mending can be inscribed in material, turning structural vulnerability into an expressive, visually resonant language.
Monika Zarzeczna
Catskill, New York
Monika Zarzeczna brings a tactile collage sensibility into three-dimensional sculpture, assembling found wood, cardboard, paint, and string into works that feel like architectural fragments or emptied vessels. Her objects, often built from discarded and weathered materials, sit at a threshold between memory and ruin: delicate painted surfaces, irregular silhouettes, and exposed joins suggest histories of use and decay while careful surface treatment keeps each piece visually taut. Zarzeczna has presented solo exhibitions and participated in residencies, including site-specific projects in Europe, where she extends her studio language into responsive, often ephemeral installations. Outdoors, her constructions invite weather, time, and context to play active roles, subtly shifting the work’s sense of incompletion and entropic beauty. Across scales, her sculptures balance improvisation with compositional control, offering moments of nostalgia, ambiguity, and quiet surprise as viewers discover how humble materials have been reconfigured into poetic, quasi-architectural forms.
